American’s love their land, especially rural Americans. Access to
land and property ownership shapes people’s identity, economic security,
and social mobility, things commonly talked about in discussions of
property rights.

We often talk less about the way property rights
protect people’s health and their environment. Especially in rural
places, laws safeguarding water and land from industrial pollution and
other types of contamination are often weak to nonexistent.

Exerting
property rights over the use and enjoyment of land offers one of the
few tools rural people have to protect themselves.

In the event
the water they drink, air they breathe, or soil they grow food on is
harmed or contaminated, they can potentially sue for nuisance.

Innocuous
sounding laws, broadly known as right-to-farm laws, though,
increasingly constrain this crucial dimension of property rights. Every
state in the nation has some version of these laws, most of them more
than three decades old, with the original promise of curtailing urban
sprawl and protecting family farms.

We recently analyzed these
laws dated from 2015 in all 50 states and found that only four state
statutes actually provided a legal basis to protect farmland from urban
encroachment.

Instead, these laws mostly protect large-scale
industrial farming operations by reducing rural people’s capacity to sue
them for nuisance when they pollute.

Rather than protecting
multi-generational farmers with deep attachments to the land and their
communities, 46 percent of right-to-farm laws offer immunity from
nuisance suits for agricultural enterprises that have been in operation
for one year. Another 12 percent give other time-specific protections
once an enterprise begins operations.

Yet only 16 percent of
right-to-farm laws provide immunity for property owners that were there
first, like farmers who live on their land and near their farms. For
example, farmers in York County, Pennsylvania, sued a newly constructed
industrial poultry confinement for nuisance within a year of its
construction. The trial court barred the suit, ruling that, among other
things, the operation obtained approval for its waste management plan
more than a year prior.

Right-to-farm laws also tend to collapse
collective rights of governance. Sixty percent of right-to-farm laws
limit the authority of local governments to regulate agricultural land
uses.

Most counties and municipalities can protect public health,
safety and welfare within their jurisdictions through ordinances and
zoning. But with agriculture, 32 states restrict local governmental
capacity to protect the people. As we write, a bill proposed in North Dakota
seeks to significantly reduce the ability of local governments to
impose zoning restrictions and control the siting of industrial
livestock operations within their jurisdictions.

All, though, is
not lost. The capacity of rural people to bind together to affront these
laws and protect their communities remains remarkable, even in the face
of what can seem to be insurmountable odds.